If you do (who doesn’t?), read this post and apply just a handful of these 25 on page SEO basics to your site.

In less than 7 days you’ll see some great improvements in your rankings and traffic.

All from a few simple tweaks that you can do yourself in your spare time.

This is preschool SEO, the very basics which most sites I review tend to have overlooked.

The majority of clients I take on have already had some kind of SEO work carried out on their sites, be it by having a go at it themselves (which normally results in repeatedly banging their head against the wall), or they’ve been paying an SEO company to do it for them (who typically have no idea what they’re doing).

Either way, the only reason they’re reaching out for help is because whatever it is they’ve been doing obviously isn’t working!

So I’ll review their website and see what needs to be done to get them ranking.

90% of the time their website is missing the bare basics, it doesn’t have enough keyword optimized content, their target keywords can’t even be found on the site, it’s missing important files like robots.txt and a sitemap, it’s got duplicate or missing meta tags, duplicate and thin content pages, there’s broken links, over sized images, etc.

Yet they’ve been paying an SEO company £1,000 a month for 6 months to do link building!

Are backlinks important? Hell yeah. But building links to an unoptimized website is just as effective as putting fuel in a car with 4 flat tyres… you’re not gonna get very far!

Before you start investing money into backlinks, first get the foundations right, make sure that your website is:

“Google Friendly”

Properly optimized for the keywords you’re targeting

Otherwise, the backlinks you build won’t deliver their full ranking potential.

In this post I’m going to walk you through, step by step, all of the on page SEO elements which you need to get right before you even think about links.

Whether you’ve got a fresh local business site or a huge established eCommerce store, you’ll see a big boost in rankings just by applying a few of these simple techniques.

All without spending a penny.

(if you’re doing the work yourself)

I’m not gonna lie, there’s a lot to go through so I’ll try to make this epic geek fest sound interesting by using funny analogies and niche examples to keep you reading.

There’s lots of “behind the scenes” things which Google takes into account when ranking your website, if you’re new to SEO you probably won’t have a clue what most of these are, but bare with me and I’ll guide you through it.

Here’s 8 “Behind the Scenes” things you need to get right before anything else…

Both of those pages display exactly the same content on two different URL’s.

Same story for every page on the site.

If your domains canonical URL isn’t set you’re going to have to set it.

But before you do, head over to Majestic SEO and see which version is the strongest.

Search for both versions (www. and none-www.) and take note of which has the highest Trust Flow.

Once you know which one to use, head over to this guide and implement one of the redirect methods.

3. Check Your Robots.txt File

The robots file allows you to control how Google’s spiders and other bots crawl your site, you can block unwanted bots from using your bandwidth or block certain pages on your site (like login pages) from being crawled and indexed in Google.

This is the first file Google looks for when it lands on your site, so it’s important to ensure it’s present and correct.

A client I took on a few months ago told me that Google just wouldn’t index his website, he’d tried everything, he’d waited months, he thought he had a penalty, I checked his robots file – it was blocking Google.

Make sure you’re not making the same mistake.

Go to yoursite.com/robots.txt

If you’ve got one – a page looking something like this will load:

If you hit a 404 error (or anything else that doesn’t look like the image above), you need to create one.

If you’ve ever deleted a page on your site, changed a page’s URL, or mistakenly linked to a page using the wrong URL, chances are that when Google crawls your site it’s going a hit a “404 error – page doesn’t exist”.

404 errors are bad for rankings, they’re dead ends and in Google’s eyes and they create a bad user experience – Google doesn’t like that.

Not only does Google frown upon dead links, but if a deleted page on your site is still indexed in Google then it’s most likely going to be bouncing back users who click on it from the search results.

To check for broken links we’ll be using Screaming Frog.

Open up the tool and follow the steps below, use the image as a guide.

Click on Filter > HTML

Click the Status Code column twice to arrange the numbers in descending order

Check at the top of that column for “404” (404 means page not found, aka – broken link)

Click on the URL in the “Address” column which is causing the 404

To see which pages on your site these broken links are located, click on “In Links” at the bottom

Here you’ll see all the pages which contain that broken link

Fix them!

Once you’ve fixed the broken links, re-spider with Screaming Frog to ensure they’re all fixed.

6. Ensure Your Site Loads Fast

Page load speed is now a critical factor in Google rankings.

In order to provide their users with a good experience, Google doesn’t want to display websites at the top of the search results if they take a long time to load because it creates a bad user experience.

People today are click happy and impatient and won’t wait around.

If your site takes too long to load, a high percentage of the people that come to your site via Google will be clicking the back button and landing back on the search results page.

This increases your bounce rate.

And a high bounce rate from organic search traffic will lower your rankings.

To prevent this, make sure you webpages load fast.

The ideal page load speed is 3 seconds or less. Anything over that and you’ll be losing visitors, increasing your bounce rate and harming your rankings.

Using GA won’t directly affect your rankings, BUT… the amount of data you get from this tool is invaluable, and you’ll definitely be able to use that data later to increase your rankings, traffic and conversions.

It’s a good idea to get this installed from the get go so you’re collecting data from day one.

The sooner you install it the more data you’ll have later on, and the more data you have the easier it’ll be to make accurate decisions when you want to apply changes and perform tests on your site in the future.

And you (or whoever you’re hiring to do your SEO) WILL have to make important decisions down the lines (when there’s a Google update for example).

Here’s what Analytics will show you:

How many visitors you’ve had to your site

Where they came from

How long they were on the site

What they did whilst they were there

How they converted

What percentage of people bounced from your site

What traffic sources your conversions are coming from

And here’s what that data will help you to do:

Improve the usability of your site

Identify your most profitable traffic sources

Increase your conversions

Lower your bounce rate

Increase your rankings

Increase your conversions

It’s free, the data you get will help you to increase the revenue you generate from your website, and there’s no reason not to install it right now by following this easy walkthrough from Google.

8. Install & Optimize Google Search Console (was Webmaster Tools)

Google Search Console is possibly one of the most valuable free tools you can use on your website.

You definitely shouldn’t skip this part.

There’s a helluva lotta things you can do with the Search Console, I’ll bore you with a full post on it later, but for now here’s an overview:

Spot new keyword opportunities

Get realistic search volumes

See if Google has found any errors whilst crawling your site

Get the latest incoming link data

Add sitelinks

Remove URL’s from the search results

Insert structured data markups with the Data Highlighter tool

See if Google’s issued any manual actions (penalties) to your site

Check your mobile usability

See what pages Google has indexed (and which they haven’t)

Test your robots file and sitemap

Spot any security issues

And lot’s more…

Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use it yet, for now you just need to get it installed.

Once you’ve signed up and verified your site, make sure you do these 7 things inside your account before moving on:

Verify both versions of your website (www. and none-www.)

Set your preferred URL (www. or none-www.)

Check your inbox for any site improvement messages from Google

Set your country targeting

Submit and test your robots file

Submit and test your sitemap

Use the Data Highlighter tool to highlight important information (like local business info – business name, address, phone number, etc)

Once you’ve got the behind the scenes stuff sorted, it’s time to pop the bonnet on your website and see if there’s anything in the code that needs fixing.

I don’t care how good your website looks…there’s always stuff which needs fixing!

Forget about keywords for now, all we’re going to be doing here is looking for mistakes that need correcting, we’ll move onto your keywords once your website is 100% “Google Friendly”.

1. Check Your Meta Tags

Meta tags are very important places to insert your target keywords, but don’t worry about keywords for now, what we’re looking for here are:

Missing meta tags

Duplicate meta tags

Open up Screaming Frog again and follow these instructions…

To check title tags:

Scroll down the right sidebar and click on “Page Titles”

Below you’ll see any missing and duplicate titles

Also, look for any titles below or above the optimum title length of 30-65 characters

Fix any errors here

For meta descriptions:

You’ll find “Meta Description” information below the “Page Titles” in the right sidebar

Perform the same checks and fixes here too

If you’re using WordPress you may notice multiple missing or duplicate meta tags on category, tags and attachment pages.

These pages are normally produced automatically and can bloat your website with lot’s of useless thin content, it’s best practice to clean these pages up by noindexing them or removing them completely.

(Double check they aren’t producing any traffic through before you remove or noindex them)

To noindex these pages, go into Yoast SEO and tick the “noindex, follow” options in the “Taxonomies” section:

If you’re not using WordPress you’ll have to Google “how to noindex pages on [your CMS]”.

If you’ve got lot’s of attachment pages (pages with a single image on), use this plugin to redirect all of those URL’s to the homepage.

For best practice I always make sure that my links to external websites always open link in a new window/tab, just like all of the contextual links on this page.

So if somebody clicks a link on my website – my site remains open in a tab.

Here’s how to check your outbound links in Screaming Frog:

Click on the “External” tab at the top

First check the “Status Code” column for any broken or redirected links (404, 301, 302), make sure all outbound links have a status code of 200

Check through the links in the “Address” column, what you want to see here is a list of relevant authority websites in your niche, if it’s just typical social profiles or irrelevant links – you need to add some good ones

OK, we’re pretty much done with the “Under the Hood” technical fixes, once you’ve gone through all of the steps above and corrected anything that needs fixing your website should be a lot more search engine friendly, time to optimize your pages for the keywords you’re targeting…

Although I shouldn’t, I’m going to assume you’ve already done your keyword research and you have a big list of keywords which you want to target.

Now we’re going to check if your pages are optimized for each one of the keywords you want to rank for.

If you have a lot of root keywords (you provide lots of services or products) plus a lot of variables (you want to rank for those services/products in a lot of different areas) you can use this tool to save a lot of time and quickly combine all of your root keywords with your variables – Keyword Multiplier.

Once you’ve got your final list of target keywords we need to create a list of search operators which we can copy and paste into Google to see if any of your website pages are at least partially optimized for your keywords:

site:yoursite.com intitle:Commercial Roofing London

site:yoursite.com intitle:Commercial Roofing Birmingham

site:yoursite.com intitle:Commercial Roofing Manchester

site:yoursite.com intitle:Commercial Roofing Newcastle

site:yoursite.com intitle:Roof Repairs London

site:yoursite.com intitle:Roof Repairs Birmingham

site:yoursite.com intitle:Roof Repairs Manchester

site:yoursite.com intitle:Roof Repairs Newcastle

I use Excel to perform these checks, just paste those search operators into column A in Excel, like so:

Now paste those into the Google search bar one by one and check your results.

What we’re looking for here is – can Google find any pages on your website which already have your target keywords in the title tags?

(The title tag is one of the most important on page optimization elements, it’s much easier to rank a page with the keyword in the title tag than a page without)

As you’re searching those search operators, if Google shows you any pages from your website – mark that keyword in yellow and paste the URL of the top ranking page into column B.

(you’ll still need to perform further checks on these pages later)

If Google shows you this:

It means that Google can’t find any pages on your site which contain those keywords in the title tags.

Mark that keyword in red.

Once you’ve gone through the whole list you’ll have two types of results:

Yellows – A list of pages which need further review.

Reds – A list of keywords which you need to create and optimize pages for.

Your Excel sheet should look something like this:

The red cells show keywords which you don’t have optimized pages for yet – you’ll need to create some using the instructions in the next section.

The yellow cells show keywords which you may have optimized pages for.

These pages still need checking to see if they’re fully optimized though so don’t get too excited!

We know your target keywords are in the titles of these pages… that’s a good start, but there’s several more things that can be done to further optimize the page.

Follow the instructions below to create new keyword optimized pages for the keywords you’re not already optimized for, or to increase the optimization (and rankings) of your under optimized pages.

On Page Optimization Elements

The following instructions will show you how to properly optimize a page for each of your target keywords.

But before we start – you’ll need to get yourself a list of LSI/related keywords for each keyword…

LSI/Related Keywords

Using lot’s of different keyword variations throughout your pages will dramatically increase the relevancy of each page, you’ll avoid over optimization penalties and as a Brucey Bonus your pages may also start ranking for all of the related keywords too.

…and paste this into the “Wildcard Search” section of Keyword Researcher, like so:

Hit play and the software will scrape Google suggest, in less than 10 seconds you’ll have all of the LSI keywords you’ll ever need.

Run through the list and choose the most applicable keywords.

Here’s the 12 most relevant LSI keywords I found for my target keyword:

Budget Removals Essex

House Removals Essex

Home Removals Essex

Furniture Removals Essex

Domestic Removals Essex

Removals Companies Essex

Removals And Storage Essex

Essex Home Removals

Essex House Removals

Removals Firms Essex

Essex Removals Companies

Essex Removals And Storage

(Keyword Researcher is a paid tool with lot’s of great features, but if you don’t want to splash out on software just yet there’s a great free tool called Tiny Suggest which does the job for scraping Google Suggest)

1. Keyword in Title Tags

This is the most important place on the whole page to insert your keyword as it’s shown directly in the search results as the title of your listing and the clickable link to your page.

If you were targeting the search term “Essex Removals” then your meta title should look like this…

Although the official character limit for the title tag is 67, the average search result only displays an about 52 characters, so make sure you don’t make your title too long and always have your main keyword as close to the start as possible.

If your keywords are in the title tag they’ll be bolded, also notice how this website is using the special characters “? and !”, these factors both help to increase your organic Click Through Rate, and Rand Fishkin of MOZ has shown that a good CTR can positively affect your rankings.

2. Keyword in Description Tags

The description tag is another valuable asset as it gives you direct control of the contents of your listing in the search results.

Use your keywords in the meta description tag and you will increase your pages optimization and the click through rate in the search results.

3. Keywords in URL

Websites with keyword rich URL’s tend to do a lot better than those without.

If your site has ugly URL’s like:

http://www.yoursite.com/2014/05/06/postid=162

Change the permalink settings to something more keyword rich, like:

http://www.yoursite.com/post-name

(As mentioned earlier in this post, if you’ve got a site with ugly URL’s and you’ve got lots of pages already ranking in Google and generating traffic, or have already built links to your ugly URL’s, hold your horses and contact an SEO expert before making any changes to the URL’s. Seriously.)

4. Keywords in Content

I’d advise creating no less than 500 words of content for each page you’re trying to rank.

The more content you have on your page the more resourceful your website will appear to Google.

Take those LSI keywords you found earlier and sprinkle those throughout your content to increase the relevancy of the page.

5. Keywords in Headings

Content is easier to read and digest when it’s presented in bite size pieces, so make use of multiple headings.

Use your exact match keyword in the main page heading (H1).

And use your related keywords in your sub headings (H2, H3, H4 etc).

6. Keywords in Alt Tags

Using images throughout your content will not only make your page look more appealing to read, it’ll also help with your rankings by keeping people on your site longer and lowering your bounce rate.

Make sure each image has a descriptive alt tag which includes your exact match and related keywords.

Really detailed post on on-page optimization.This is really important, because many people start with link building early, without to properly optimize their pages and did not achieved good results. Another point that I would suggest to include is about the mobile friendly design, as you know Google has an update about this 🙂

Best thing is to make a different design for mobile and desktop. Is not such an important factor, but it does help you a lil’ bit more since you’re thinking in the smartphone/mobile user experience too in your website.

Maybe a responsively designed web page can do the work, but Google doesn’t take it as a mobile design

This a great evergreen guide Carl. As you quite rightly pointed out at the start, all of your link building efforts will be affected if you don’t get your basic on-page SEO right. Bookmarking for future use.

Great stuff Carl! You mentioned 6 to 12 LSI keywords per article. Sometimes, it is very hard to implemented all these keywords in the same article. Do you have some tips when it comes to adding them to your content?

Hi Nikolay, only rule I stand by for this is if it looks spammy just expand the content until it flows, the more content you have on the page the more resourceful it will appear to Google and the more long tails you’ll be able to rank for, just don’t make it look keyword stuffed and you’re fine

Amazing, indeed!On page is really powerful. I want to share my personal experience about on page optimization. When I started optimizing the content and title of my page which includes putting keyword in the Title, in the content, and in meta description really helped me a lot to increase my site rankings in the search engine.